World's 'longest-serving' death row inmate granted retrial in Japan

A 78-year-old Japanese man is freed following more than four decades on death
row after a court finds DNA tests on bloodstained clothing do not match

Hideko Hakamada, sister of former boxer Iwao Hakamada who has been on death row in Japan for 48 years, holding a picture of her young brother Iwao during an interview outside the Tokyo Detention House in TokyoPhoto: AFP/GETTY

The world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been freed by a court in Japan after doubts were cast over the evidence used to convict him nearly half a century earlier.

Iwao Hakamada, 78, was set free following more than four decades on death row after Shizuoka District Court suspended his sentence and ordered a retrial.

Mr Hakamada was sentenced to death in 1968 after being found guilty of killing a family of four, including two children, and burning down their central Japan home, where he worked as a live-in employee.

The nation’s lengthy appeal process meant that Mr Hakamada, a former pro boxer, was forced to wait for 27 years before the Supreme Court denied his first appeal for a retrial.

However, Mr Hakamada escaped execution by filing a second appeal in 2008, with the court finally ruling in his favour in his most recent hearing, resulting in his immediate release.

The overturning of his conviction was hinged on DNA tests on bloodstained clothing which proved that despite the prosecutors’ arguments at his first trial, did not belong to him.

Ordering his release, pending a retrial, and describing the original verdict as an injustice, Hiroaki Murayama, the presiding judge, said: “It is unbearably unjust to prolong detention of the defendant any further. The possibility of his innocence has become clear to a respectable degree.”

Mr Hakamada, whose mental health has deteriorated following decades spent in isolation, spent 45 of his 48 years in prison awaiting execution on death row, prompting Guinness World Records to officially identify him last year as the world’s longest serving death row inmate.

Welcoming the verdict, his sister Hideko Hakamada, 81, who has spent more than half of her life tirelessly pursuing legal battles on his behalf, described her joy at his release.

“I just want to praise him for enduring all these years,” she tearfully told reporters. “Forty-seven years is an awfully long time.”

Mr Hakamada is only the sixth death row inmate in Japan to receive a retrial in the nation’s history of postwar criminal justice, with four acquitted and the fifth case still pending.

His case casts a critical light on Japan’s controversial closed interrogation system, with Mr Hakamada initially confessing to the crime following a 20-day closed interrogation before protesting his innocence during his first trial.

“The Japanese authorities should be ashamed of the barbaric treatment Hakamada has received,” said Roseann Rife, East Asia research director at Amnesty International.

“For more than 45 years he has lived under the constant fear of execution, never knowing from one day to the next if he is going to be put to death. This adds psychological torture to an already cruel and inhumane punishment.”

Japan and the United States are the only two major industrialised nations to maintain capital punishment, with a high level of support for the death penalty from members of the public.

Last year, eight people were put to death in Japan, while nearly 130 further inmates are currently estimated to be awaiting execution on death row.